The challenge this week, since it’s the Daily Post’s last week with us at WordPress, is to share an all-time favorite. They each did this also, and if you are only seeing this post on MY blog, please treat yourself to some spectacular photography at
I can’t wait to see all the photos shared this week by the WordPress community!
I’m actually really glad I have more than one picture in my favorite personal category…Accidental Photography.
These are photos where either I didn’t mean to click but was greatly rewarded anyway, or when I took a picture of one thing, I discovered later a huge additional surprise in the shot.
I learn so much about observation, paying attention, taking my time, and choosing perspective from photos like these and I am so grateful.
I thought I had just captured the beauty of these blossoms…
I couldn’t quite edit this one of a sun dog to fit in this post but I still have no idea what the perfect little “moon” is in the shot.This one was taken among 30 or so clicks, trying to capture Hummingbirds at this feeder. I almost deleted it!
OK, see if you can follow my logic this week. Unity makes me think of the only church I have ever attended with any regularity in my adult life. I picked it in the beginning as a reaction to the oppressive and emotionally blackmailing religious upbringing I had survived. When I first found it, Unity of Bellevue seemed like the place where all the peacenik, flower children had landed.
So I stayed…well, off and on, for more than 40 years now.
I stayed for the open mindedness. I stayed because they had the Galaxy painted on the ceiling of the kids Sunday School area. I stayed because they had a class called The Joy of Sects….go ahead…say it out loud. I stayed because there were these beautiful banners hanging all over the sanctuary, banners of Jewish symbols, because Unity of Bellevue shared it’s building with a local, slightly rebellious Jewish community leaving their main synagogue. I stayed for the workshops and guest speakers, like The Three Amigos (a Unity Pastor, Jewish Rabbi and Muslim Sheikh…Listen at your leisure for a wonderful talk.)
But mostly I kept returning to the Unity church for the music. Every summer in August, they had a service that was a great celebration of music from 40 years before. My favorites were the years 1967 and 1968. It was just music and congregation members standing up and speaking about what that music or year meant to them. I totally regressed and stayed up all night making “love Beads”. Then during the service that Sunday, I wandered through the audience putting necklaces around people’s necks! (Flashbacks of Woodstock!)
Many incredible musicians at this little church but my favorite was these two women named Garnett Hundley and Beverly Daugherty. http://www.garnettandbeverly.com/
Just about anything they sang (and they had a spectacular variety) was fun or beautiful or inspirational.
This is a long way to get to my song for this week, but the following is one of my favorites songs by those two women I would hear at the Unity church. Maybe not their most beautiful or modern piece, but the message for me is the thing!!
Wish I’d heard this as a squashed kid!!!
Couldn’t find the lyrics but again, their website is http://www.garnettandbeverly.com/
Thought I’d include info about this weekly challenge.
Here are the “rules”:
Post the lyrics to the song of your choice, whether it fits the theme or not
Please try to include the songwriter(s) – it’s a good idea to give credit where credit is due and it’s honestly just a simple Google search
Make sure you also credit the singer/band and provide a link to where you found the lyrics
Link to the YouTube video, or pull it into your post so others can listen to the song
Ping back to this post or my own Song Lyric Sunday post
Read at least one other person’s blog so we can all share new and fantastic music and create amazing new blogging friends in the process
Feel free to use the Song Lyric Sunday badge by copying it into your post or add it to your site to show you are participating.
This might be a stretch. But if you happen to be a regular reader, you might be getting the idea that I am kind of a Rule Bender in a quiet-ish way.
This week, first came the Weekly Photo Challenge. I searched and thought and plotted to find or take a great Face-in-the-Crowd shot. I had the same weird internal ethical debates I always have about taking photos of strangers without their permission…even a face in a crowd.
Then my grandsons invited me to watch a movie. We watched Okja, an odd little Korean film. (Trailer down below, but it’s full of spoilers…better to watch unprepared, in my opinion.) By the way, Common Sense Media says 15 years plus, and though my grandsons are 12 and 14, I agree. My oldest one kept saying “one minute you think this is a great kid’s movie and the next it’s really, REALLY not!”
I will tell you that while watching it, I couldn’t help but thinking about the Weekly Photo Challenge Theme….which made me start thinking in a whole new direction.
I love animals and I tell you what, it is getting more and more difficult to eat anything with a face. I have been mostly vegetarian for almost 50 years…no red meat of any kind during that time and only the occasional fish and poultry…including Salmon of course ( I DO live in the Northwest after all) and Turkey on Thanksgiving!
With this movie giving me a new way of thinking of the face in the crowd, I remembered an experience a few years back that left me both in awe for the beauty of it and a kind of disgust and guilt for the fact of it.
On a repeated vacation to San Diego, the place where we stay has this massive Koi Pond. For a quarter, you can feed the spectacularly colorful fish.
They were beautiful and I suppose there is value in sharing that contained beauty with people if it heightens their consciousness about our cohabitants on Mother Earth. (Don’t get me started on the two sides of the whole Zoo Debate.)
But it was also an example of a pitiful and frightening feeding frenzy.
There was this one fish-face that caught my eye. I kept my eye on him so I knew it was the same one over and over. His face kept appearing midst the fevered quest for food.
Maybe it was that he was so huge and that made me wonder if this had been his whole life, battle after crowded battle for tidbits of man-made cereal nuggets.
That thought made me incredibly sad. I mean, Koi can live for up to 200 years! And these guys had already been trapped in this resort pond for 35 years that I know of.
It just felt wrong.
I don’t know any resolution, or if there even needs to be one. I mean, I raise Giant Leaf Bugs and keep them in a terrarium for their entire lives…my rationale being they live almost a year longer in my captivity than in their native wild. My cats are strictly indoor cats for the same reason…longer lives than if they ventured out among the hawks and coyotes in my area.
Anyway, this is my Face in the Crowd post for the week.
I’d love to hear what you think.
5 Interesting Facts About Koi Fish from https://www.sweeneyfeeders.com/5-interesting-facts-koi-fish/
1. Koi fish originate from Japan and represent love and friendship in Japanese culture.
2. Most koi fish outlive their owners, having a lifespan of 200+ years.
3. They come in a variety of colors, not just orange. They may appear orange, yellow, white, red and black.
4. Owners who received their koi fish as a gift are believed to have good luck.
5. In Japan, koi fish are often passed down from generation to generation, as a family heirloom.
I love them. When I see them, something confusing happens in my cells…as if there is a part of me that remembers a time when a cloud was just a cloud. Yes, sometimes it could have resembled a buffalo or a face, but it was just a cloud, no geometry involved
There was no one up there drawing perfectly straight lines across the sky…..
Can you imagine being Native to our country and looking upward to Father Sky only to see views like these?
This might be a stretch, but I have discovered a hidden prejudice.
I’m not being too hard on myself for it though. We have all been inundated with this bias for eons. Not that a history of being misinformed excuses racism or anything.
But this is a black vs. white thing.
I know the bad guy is usually on the black horse and the good guy on a bright white steed. I know black cats are supposedly scary and bad luck. I also know the black dogs in an animal shelter are the last to be adopted. Oh, and supposedly we all have this dark side and we need to be sharing more light in the world.
What the hell is all that anyway? Where did it come from?
I’m sure someone out there knows way more about all this than I and this is not really a post about the archetypes in history anyway.
It’s about Mushrooms.
I don’t really know anything about mushrooms…except that I will enjoy them in a salad or sometimes even sauté them in butter and they are yummy. But what isn’t yummy when sautéed in butter, right? But that is the extent of my knowledge. (I know, I know, I came of age in the 1960’s in California so I should at least know about “Shrooms”, right? I just never went there…)
But on my daily walks, I recently spotted some of these fungi growing and started photographing them. I found quite a variety, including some cute little patches that reminded me somehow of tiny fairy villages…or families.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
There were a lot of different kinds, shapes, sizes and colors. I do live in the Pacific Northwest after all and it is seriously WET up here.
All of these were so interesting…their patterns of growth, their shape, size, and their similar but different hues. I’m probably passing up some fancy truffles or something, but I also know some mushrooms can be toxic. I have no idea how to identify those, so I just left them ALL alone for whatever creature eats them in the wild of my suburban neighborhood.
Then I spotted these, right in my own yard.
They literally popped up overnight and gave me the creeps when I bent down to snap a picture with my phone. They just LOOK evil…like they could reach up and grab me, or spit blinding venom in my eyes or something.
Even if someone told me these mushrooms were an extremely sought-after delicacy, I think I’d rather eat a snake than go near these things again. I’m afraid to even remove them. They might release deadly spores into the air.
They are scary looking…especially because they are black, not a clean white or a warm, enticing golden color…you know, how mushrooms are supposed to look.
I’m sorry but this guy is COMING for ME!
I purposely did not Google (yes, it is now officially a VERB) mushrooms before I wrote this because I didn’t want to influence my initial reaction. I finally tried Wikipedia, Googles Reverse Image, etc., etc. But I never found my new arrivals. James says they look like they are from Mordor.
This theme touches me deeply. I have had so many clients in my 40 some years in private practice who are terribly damaged because the responsible adults in their lives when they were kids, told them they were “crazy”.
Their attempts at art or music were criticized.
Their young and innocent goals were diminished.
They had just imagined that abuse.
They were told often enough that they were crazy, they actually began to wonder…and that WILL drive you to MADNESS, not being able to trust your own intelligence, perceptions and intuition in your life.
(This post is dedicated to my compassionate friend in Kentucky. You know who you are and you are not CRAZY!)
Crazy by Gnarls Barkley (CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse)
Lyrics
I remember when
I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions have an echo in so much space
And when you’re out there, without care
Yeah I was out of touch
But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough
I just knew too much
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly
And now that you are having the time of your life
Well think twice
That’s my only advice
Come on now, who do you
Who do you, who do you
Who do you think you are?
Ha ha ha, bless your soul
You really think you’re in control?
Well
I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
I think you’re crazy
Just like me
My heroes had the heart
To lose their lives out on a limb
And all I remember, is thinking
I wanna be like them
Mm hmm ever since I was little
Ever since I was little it looked like fun
And it’s no coincidence I’ve come
And I can die when I’m done
